Celestia Forums

Hi, I've been trying to find a package for Celestia 1.6.0 for Ubuntu. It isn't in getdeb.net, and Debian has only Celestia 1.5.1. What can I do to help you get 1.6.0 into Debian, so that it can work its way to Lucid? I tried to get it into Karmic and nothing happened. I figure you guys know better than me how to do this, but I'll do what I can to help.

Have you tried contacting the person who provided v1.5.1 for Ubuntu/Debian?

I don't recall anyone who has built Celestia for any of the linux distributions ever mentioning here that they're doing so. Celestia's development team hasn't provided distribution-specific builds for several years (and then it was only for SUSE). A source-code kit for building under linux is available on SourceForge at http://sourceforge.net/projects/celestia/files/.

Whoever it is who's responsible for Celestia in Ubuntu, the decision to split out the nonfree package and make it not a dependency of the main program is a stupid one - every so often we get a Ubuntu user in these forums who is asking why the planets are untextured. This is because many of the textures do not get installed by default, and Ubuntu provides no indication that this additional package exists if you install the program through the Add/Remove programs window. If they have problems with it, they should move the entire package to nonfree, distributing a broken version helps no-one.

stone1343 wrote:Hi, I've been trying to find a package for Celestia 1.6.0 for Ubuntu. It isn't in getdeb.net, and Debian has only Celestia 1.5.1. What can I do to help you get 1.6.0 into Debian, so that it can work its way to Lucid? I tried to get it into Karmic and nothing happened. I figure you guys know better than me how to do this, but I'll do what I can to help.

Given the inflationary number of competing Linux distributions, with 100s of distribution-specific patches, why should the OpenSource producers of attractive software (7.6 Million Celestia downloads from Sourceforge) undertake the enormous additional effort of integrating their software into ~20 specific Linux environments?? Instead of 20 or more Linux distributions, THREE or so would be perfectly sufficient in the eyes of many users and software developers! We don't have the manpower of serving all Linux flavors with binary Celestia distributions etc. So why should we give preference to a particular one (like Debian/Ubuntu)?

Anyway, SUSE had no problems with implementing Celestia 1.6.0 into their official 11.2 distribution, based on our published 1.6.0 source tarball at SF...

Fridger

Actually it's not as bad as some of you make it to be.
There are hundreds of Linux distributions, yes.
But testing the few mainline is going to get a lot of ground covered. (if not all)
A lot of distributions have other distribution as starting point.

The real question is about development libraries and packaging, distributing software.
Linux is terribly scattered, doesn't seem to care about the developers.
The Distribution maintainers are happy to have to maintain an enormous amount of work, patches on applications.
(Are they crazy?)

Celestia could use someone who makes a .deb and .rpm package.
Tests it on minimum 2 (one debian based e.g. Ubuntu and rpm based e.g. Fedora, SUSE, RHEL) distributions.
The package could be located on the download page the same way the Windows and Mac Installers are now.

Fridger has a point, and the LSD (Linux Standard Base) should be more prominent in this field.
(Currently LSB is at rpm v3, if it's not doable to bump the version number, allow both: v3 and 4, retarded LSB-clowns!!)
e.g. Fedora 12 has rpm 4.7
For a lot of software developers, having to support all those packaging versions is very disadvantageous.
Also, the distribution maintainers like to make their own universes of packages, which is actually a very bad idea.
The distributions are going over the line if they make a customized version.
Putting some metadata, pictures, url's and the application in a database is good.
Changing that application and having to support it is bad.
As you can see for the problems caused, coupled with the packaging stuff, are really prominent for every application except the most used e.g.Office, graphics.

Well stone1343, you need to embark on a epic mission to learn to make .deb of Celestia.
This isn't so easy as it seems, you won't just package it in a zip.
You will also need to add correct metadata, sometimes with Legal Requirements.
Can you do that for Celestia?
(Hint: Anjuta IDE)

You will need to install Debian and use it to make and test the package.

Also here a good link to another conversation, with a post of mine with a lot of useful links:
http://www.shatters.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=13449&start=30